The old Skype.
It wasn't successful?
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
171–180 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#172XMPP. The entire chat landscape is a damn travesty right now. First Facebook disappeared behind it’s own walls, then google... I really miss the days where I could use one client to chat with all my contacts. I honestly think Im in contact with less people now because everyone dropped support for open protocols.
Xmpp is a disaster, I have otp enabled and all too often messages are delivered to the wrong machine, but encrypted with a different key, so it is pure garbage and lost forever.
That is on the off chance that the message is actually delivered.
Trying to get omemo up and running, but some clients (pidgin) have next to no support for it, while others only support it, and it seems it is only supported on ejabberd as of very recently, with documentation on how to enable it consisting of a comment line in a config file.
I am not inclined to positively review a chat protocol that frequently fails to deliver messages.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#173Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#174Swype. It disappeared from my phone this week and I'm in shambles.
Along the same lines is Fleksy.
They had a completely unique approach to typing.
It was abandoned and later bought out by Pintrest.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#175Chevy Volt. I wouldn't necessarily say it wasn't successful, but GM is killing it, and to me the irony is that I think it is a much better option for 90% of people than an all-electric vehicle. Yes, all-electric is the future, but right now being able to be on battery 95% of the time, but never having range anxiety because I can always get gas when needed, is wonderful. I can go on long trips and never worry about ha…
I bought one. It had terrible battery that gave me less and less range on every charge. Resale value was non existent. Piece of garbage.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#176Nokia N9 + Meego/Maemo devices.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lord no. In what universe would it make sense to let random people spam a channel you're using to coordinate an emergency response.
Intake/ingestion.
Avenues for that already exist. But the signal from those kinds of things is so so low compared to the noise that you often need multiple layers of moderation and filtering before anything useful.
A direct line from $random user to the on call is a recipe for disaster (ie your sres quitting) when you have many users. Engineers aren't first line tech support and those roles shouldn't be confused.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#178OS/2
Anecdote: OS/2 ISV was responsible for bringing the Start button back to Windows.
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#179Pebble smart-watches. I had them from the original kickstarter, and eventually had a Pebble Time Round which I loved. Whilst I now would never buy a smartwatch, I think that theirs were by far the best. Slimline, with a great UI, and nice functionality, and also not locked into either mobile ecosystem. I'm not entirely sure what caused their death, but my personal view is that they tried to become too big, and I don'…
How are they dead? My wife uses hers all the time... And they're still for sale on Amazon?
Re: Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
#180Pebble smart-watches. I had them from the original kickstarter, and eventually had a Pebble Time Round which I loved. Whilst I now would never buy a smartwatch, I think that theirs were by far the best. Slimline, with a great UI, and nice functionality, and also not locked into either mobile ecosystem. I'm not entirely sure what caused their death, but my personal view is that they tried to become too big, and I don'…
How are they dead? My wife uses hers all the time... And they're still for sale on Amazon?
The company was acquired and their watches are no longer manufactured or supported.